Hunger: Bobby Sands in Agony on film

"Hunger" directed by British filmmaker Steve McQueen, is a frightening look at life in Maze Prison during the IRA "dirty" protests of 1981. As the scenes unfold in this unrelentingly dark film, the camera moves into cells with walls covered in feces, through halls flooded with pools of urine, under the clubs of sadistic prison guards as they beat prisoners and into close-ups of the savage chopping of hair and beards, with bits of scalp and flesh cut away for good measure. This is violence that goes both ways, balancing the savagery neatly with the assassination of a prison guard while visiting his mother in a rest home. He ends up with his brains blown out in her lap, as she stares uncomprehending into the distance.

The graphic violence is difficult to take, and this is certainly intentional. McQueen wanted to make the horrors of that period visual and visceral for today’s audiences. There have been so many other calamities and historical upheaval since those years, that we are in danger of forgetting the suffering that so many went through, and this film very successfully puts the brutality of that era "in your face." The director achieves a growing tension in the film through several strategies, some of them quite effective. At the beginning there is a sense of barely contained violence in the images, and interaction that eventually explodes into scenes of horrible brutality. This is also reflected in the dialog. McQueen has stated that at first he wanted to begin the film with almost total silence, and then build the pressure to a sudden outpouring of words. He eventually modified this approach somewhat, with the first thirty minutes or so of the film characterized by extremely sparse dialog. The near silence is suddenly ruptured by the first incongruous sound of chattering voices in the prison chapel, where a Catholic priest is saying Mass, his formulaic words barely audible above the din of urgent conversation. The camera pulls back to reveal a crowded room of political prisoners standing around talking excitedly as though at a cocktail party, rushing the words out in this their only opportunity to communicate beyond their isolated cells. It is a highly effective scene, illustrating beautifully the paradox of profanity, humanity and religious mission at the basis of the IRA movement.

Many questions are raised by a film like this. The most obvious ones begin with, "What for?" Why did these men join the IRA, why did they fight so tenaciously in the prison, and why were they treated so inhumanely? And the most pertinent question, why bring this all up now?

Steve McQueen avoids any direct answer to these questions in the interviews he has given regarding the film. It seems that he considers the entire tragedy of those years to have been a force of human nature, an inevitable Via Dolorosa that the Irish and British people needed to stumble through for their own salvation. He says that he created the story in a non-judgmental way, and did not intend to take sides with this film. However, the portrayal of Bobby Sands, the most well-known IRA fighter from that period, is presented with undeniably heroic overtones. For this reason, the film will almost certainly be very controversial in its UK release in October, 2008.

Although the scenes are intense, the storyline of the film has certain weaknesses that detract from its potential impact. The story seems to meander from a distance before it finally takes some direction to chronicle the last days of Bobby Sands’ life. It begins in the home of one prison guard as he leaves for work in the morning. It follows him into Maze Prison where it then takes up with a new prisoner as he is being processed into this vast dungeon. We follow this prisoner into his cell where his cellmate has already covered the walls with his own feces. We are quite far into the 96 minute film before we even meet Bobby Sands, played by Michael Fassbender, and a while more after that before we realize that this silent character locked up further down the corridor is, in fact, the protagonist of this film. In compensation, Fassbender’s performance, when he is finally brought front and center, is outstanding, and his final agony as he struggles with his own responsibilities and slowly dies of hunger, wasting away before our eyes, is an astounding performance.

But besides chronicling the physical suffering, McQueen is interested in also presenting the intellectual dilemma that this situation laid bare: the anachronistic existence of this medieval religious warfare in Twentieth Century Western Europe. He achieves that through the use of a crucial central scene, a polemical conversation between Sands and a priest who has come to visit him in the prison just as the hunger strike is getting underway. This seventeen minute scene, a tour de force filmed without any cuts, seeks to encapsulate through dialectics the entire tangle of contradictions, paradoxes and doom inherent in the situation, with Sands defending the choices made by the striking prisoners, and the priest taking the opposing views.

At the Sarajevo Film Festival, there was much talk about the technical achievement of creating such a long scene without any cuts, as well as the dramatic talents of the two actors in pulling this off. However, the real measure of success for this scene is how effectively it communicates the message. In my opinion, the seventeen minutes without a cut was static and counterproductive. It served to highlight the stagey-ness of the dialogue, with the back and forth repartee of Sands and his confessor quickly becoming wooden and artificial. After about five minutes I had the sense of watching a verbose Edwardian production, and the scene still had twelve more minutes to go. Perhaps in an attempt to give it an emotional drive, the actors gradually talked faster and faster, but for me, this only made it worse. It seemed like they were pushing the words out to try to get through the scene before collapsing in exhaustion. With these distractions, I had difficulty listening to the barrage of arguments in those thick Ulster accents and I found myself repeatedly wondering when this scene would ever be over.

Even with its defects, this film is forceful and impressive, reminding us that history can never truly be resolved. The implications go far beyond the borders of Northern Ireland. When the film was shown at the Sarajevo Film Festival in August 2008, the actor who played the priest, Liam Cunningham, alluded to this when he spoke to that Bosnian audience, referring to parallels between the Irish situation and Bosnia’s own "troubles." Steve McQueen has also hinted at a certain parallel between the brutality of Maze Prison and the prison scandals that have come out of the Iraqi occupation. This may be a story about one time in British history, but in a sense it is about the tragedy of human nature, when one group takes control over another, far beyond the rules of civilized society.

"Hunger" is an important addition to the body of work dealing with this painful period. Hopefully it will inspire a new, more emotionally detached discussion of the meaning of those years. This film very articulately poses the questions. If it has no answers to give, that is because there are still none to give. This is history still being written, very painfully, one page at a time.